1799802 - Finish implementing the "query" endpoint faceting mechanism including URL mutation while faceting

Status: NEW

(Webtools :: Searchfox, enhancement)

Description

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Bug 1762817 implemented the core mechanism for faceting, with faceting support by path and symbol relation. Unfortunately, the augment-results mechanism doesn't actually seem to fully augment right now, so the symbol relation doesn't get populated.

The key next steps are:

• Implement the JS widget for faceting. This would probably want to be iterated on, but the approach we ended up going with in Thunderbird where we display a context-menu on click equivalent to provide include/exclude is probably a fair starting point.
• Ensure the templating is correctly reflecting the facets into the underlying HTML such that selectors can be used to perform the relevant filtering simply.
• Perform the relevant filtering simply. (Which implies not really handling intersecting faceting directives or leaving it up to CSS to determine whether something is shown or not.)
• Finalize the URL persistence plan and implement it. Tentatively, I think the most reasonable approach for the currently planned faceting is to do it client-side based on the hash, with faceting mutating the hash.
  • This can be shared and is shared with full fidelity and underlying caching. If we pushed the faceting into the query string or other GET parameters, this would defeat current server caching and make it a real pain for someone trying to help someone consider their results as they find they're "zoomed in" to the results and have to experience potential latency to zoom back out (although that would potentially be cached already, of course.)